"… by my side a royall Mayd / Her daintie limbes full softly down did lay". His heart is "ravisht with delight" at her unspecified "blandishments", which she "to me delivered all that night". She leaves at dawn, telling him she is the "Queene of Faeries", and he is left bereft, staring at the "pressed gras where she had lyen".

The poet is having an arousing dream, "much too strong for fantasy", about his beloved, when she awakes him in person. She has interrupted him just before the crucial moment, yet he is not disappointed. "Enter these arms, for since thou thoughtst it best, / Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest".

Iago tells a horrified Othello of what seems clear evidence that Michael Cassio has had an erotic dream about Othello's wife. "And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand, / Cry 'O sweet creature!' and then kiss me hard … laid his leg / O'er my thigh, / And sigh'd, and kiss'd". It is all a lie, of course.

In Herrick's peculiar nocturnal fantasy, he sees Anacreon, "Flusht" with wine, canoodling with "a young enchantress". But he is too "cup-shot" to be properly aroused, so she invites the poet to take his place. "Since when (methinks) my brains about do swim, / And I am wild and wanton like to him".

Virtuous Ambrosio is a seething cauldron of disguised desires, so naturally dreams of "the most voluptuous objects". In one dream he kisses a picture of the Madonna – who comes to life, steps from the canvas and embraces him. So in his sleep the self-proclaimed celibate "rioted in joys till then unknown to him".

The Poet, a Wordsworthian solitary, wanders away from humankind to seek inspiration. But he is tormented by his repressed desires, visited in his dreams by "a veiled maid" who is "kindled" into "a permeating fire". She starts singing a wild song, and he sees "Her glowing limbs beneath the sinuous veil". "He reared his shuddering limbs … and spread his arms to meet / Her panting bosom". "With frantic gesture and short breathless sigh", she enfolds him.

The eponymous shepherd tells us of his dream, in which, out of the shining moon, comes a beautiful, heaven-sent woman. They embrace; "Madly did I kiss / The wooing arms which held me." There is a smell of flowers and honey, and oblivion follows.

Anna, married to Karenin, has fallen for Vronsky and begins to be visited nightly by the same weird and sexy dream. "She dreamt that both at once were her husbands, and lavished their caresses on her." In the dream it seems like a lovely solution: both men kiss and stroke her and are "contented and happy". But when she wakes the dream weighs on her like a nightmare.

"Lilith" by Vladimir Nabokov

A thoroughly disturbing nocturnal fantasy, in which the dreamer imagines being seduced by an all-too-youthful nymph. It is like some illicit encounter out of Ovid's Metamorphoses: "Snake within snake, vessel in vessel, / smooth-fitting part, I moved in her".

V. has an affair with Mélanie l'Heuremaudit, whose father owns a large estate in Normandy. Among Mélanie's dreams, which Pynchon details, is one in which she slides down the great mansard roof of the family house. "Her skirt would fly above her hips, her black-stockinged legs would writhe" and the sensation of "roof-tiles sliding beneath the hard curve of her rump" would arouse her to ecstasy.